Wilde's Thread in the Fabric of Decadent Art

Abstract

“Fin de siécle”, murmured Lord Henry. “Fin du Globe”, answered his hostess. “/ wish it were fin du globe”, said Dorian with a sigh. “Life is a great disappoitment.” ' Irish civilization, wrote James Joyce, is a vast fabric in which “‘it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread’’.? This is also true of literature, and should be remembered whenever one has the temptation of evaluating a literary work from the point of view of originality versus imitation, as in the case of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Since its publication until very recently the novel has been unfairly referred to by some critics as an imitation or borrowing of different sources as Amold, Poe, Huysmans, Rossetti, Stevenson, Gautier and Pater, leaving, it seems, little left of Wilde himself. (Mario Praz, not only called him “a passive imitator, but placed Dorian Gray in the French School “as a curious exotic reflection of it’).